


Sing When They Burn

by Bagheera



Category: Vikings (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Intercrural Sex, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Multi, Norse Myths & Legends, Public Sex, Slash, Threesome - F/M/M, Vikings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-16
Updated: 2013-03-16
Packaged: 2017-12-05 12:09:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/723146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bagheera/pseuds/Bagheera
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ragnar and Floki share a sleeping bag. They also share a history. </p><p>Set during 1.02 "Wrath of the Northmen" during the journey to England.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sing When They Burn

This is not Floki’s first raid. When Ragnar was fifteen, and had been on two raids successfully, he decided to bring Floki along with him. Sigeir, the leader of that raid, wasn’t happy when he saw Floki, so he made Ragnar vouch for him, which meant that Ragnar could lay claim to Floki’s share after the raid, but he would also be punished in his stead if something went wrong. That summer, Ragnar’s only punishment was to come home empty-handed, because it turned out that he could keep Floki from doing anything dangerous, but he couldn’t turn him into a warrior. 

At fifteen years, Ragnar was a foolish boy burning hot with friendship and dreaming of fame. He has grown cunning since then, and he brings Floki along for good reasons. 

“No,” Floki says, when Ragnar tells him that he is coming with them, shaking his head like a horse shaking off flies. “You know I don’t go on raids. I don’t go to the Thing. I stay here, with the trees. I – “

The stream of his words dries out. His gaze shifts furtively to the boat, and his fingers twitch. Ragnar grins. People think that Floki is the sly one, the reader of fortunes and men, but it is Ragnar. “You’re coming,” he says, pulling Floki into a one-armed embrace. “It’s your boat.”

*

There are many rumors about Floki. That he eats small children, and sees the future in a shallow bowl of water mixed with blood, that he speaks to the birds and the trees, that he is a giant, a troll, a descendant of the gods, a witch. That he has turned into a woman at certain phases of the moon, that he once spent a whole month sitting in a tree – this last one is true, Ragnar was there. What’s not true is that Floki went mad while sitting on that tree. He was always mad, as long as Ragnar has known him, and that’s a long time. They met when Ragnar was a boy yet unrecognized by the Thing and Ragnar’s father pointed out a strange boy several years his senior to him and said, “That is a boy who will never receive his rings from the Jarl. Don’t be like him.”

“Why?” Ragnar asked, because he was always annoyingly curious and disrespectful. 

His father cuffed him on the head. “Don’t ask stupid questions.”

So of course Ragnar had to find out for himself. 

*

All of the men in their raiding party trust Floki with their lives, or at least they trust his shipwright’s skills. They share their drink and food with him, they don’t mind that Floki is unreliable in a fight and never works the oars, and that sometimes he laughs or cries or sings for hours and nothing but a stern word from Ragnar will make him make sense. It is understood that Floki is one of them, but also not one of them, that he does his own kind of work, but it is not theirs. Floki knows the sky, the ship, the sails and the oars and the sea. He’s like the ravens in their cages – useless, until they’re not. 

Still, some of the men look oddly at Ragnar for being so close to Floki. Closer than he is to his own brother, whom Ragnar doesn’t trust half as far as he trusts his favorite madman. 

What they don’t understand is that Ragnar understands Floki, and Floki understands Ragnar because they’re both mad. 

*

Ragnar has proven many times that he is mad. When he decided that the only woman for him was Lagertha Dragon-watched. When he saw omens on the battlefield, and spoke to wanderers without names. When he sat beneath a tree for a month. When he built a ship to sail to the West. 

Still, he is a warrior. He wears his rings, raises his children right, fights bravely on raids and laughs only when laughter is appropriate, cries only when tears are expected. He has himself under control, more so than many men, and that is why some call him sly, secretive, fox-eyed. 

Floki is a reed, quivering in the wind. He’s seaweed, swaying in a current only he can feel. He can listen to the trees, but he can’t make them stop speaking to him. 

He’s been hanging to the ship’s dragon-shaped bow for an hour, lashed by the storm and the sea, and Ragnar is beginning to worry that he’ll fall asleep and slip down into the sea. Everyone but the man steering the ship is huddled beneath the covers, trying to stay as warm and dry as possible, but Floki seems determined to become the first man who drowns _on_ a ship. 

“Let him drown himself,” Rollo grunts when Ragnar gets up. Ragnar ignores him, and weaves his way towards the bow. He approaches Floki slowly, because it is never good to startle him. Up close, he sees that Floki’s skin has a bluish tint, his short hair is plastered to his skull, and he’s shaking with noiseless laughter. He clings to the bow like a lover. If he could, Ragnar thinks, Floki would make love to the wood. 

“Floki,” he calls against the wind, as gently as he can. “Enough!”

Floki doesn’t seem to hear him, Ragnar is only one voice among many. Then suddenly he turns around. His face is streaked with paint, his eyes strangely clear. He shakes his head, then he hides his face against the bow. 

The ship is dancing on the waves, and Ragnar is holding on with both hands, well-aware of the danger. Now he lets go with one hand and begins prying Floki off the bow. Floki doesn’t cooperate, but neither does he fight Ragnar, and in the end he clings to Ragnar instead, frightfully cold and shivering. Many winters have taught Ragnar that Floki never gets sick, and doesn’t feel the cold like other men do, but once they’re underneath the covers again, he rubs him as dry as he can and wraps him into his sleeping bag. 

*

Everyone who’s ever been on a sea raid knows how important it is to find a good sleeping bag partner. Some men prefer to sleep on their own in a small size sleeping bag to being kicked and jostled all night, but a bag that sleeps two can make the difference between frozen toes or no frozen toes, and in Ragnar’s opinion, a man who can’t share a bag is a man who shouldn’t be on a raiding ship, because clearly he doesn’t know how to make compromises and get along with his shield brothers. Ragnar usually has Rollo to share with, because they’re brothers and they shared a bed since they were children, and it would be a sign to the others that there is bad blood between them if they didn’t share. But there _is_ bad blood between them, and there has been for a long time, a simmering, foul broth of misgivings and supposed slights. 

So when he gets into Floki’s sleeping bag with him and tries to get Floki to lie like a man and not curled up like a cat in some impossible position, Rollo glowers at him and Ragnar knows this is another slight to add to the list – a list that Rollo keeps, not Ragnar, because Rollo is the one who always wants everything Ragnar has. 

Floki is surprisingly strong for someone who is all bone and sinew and skin. He twists in Ragnar’s arms like a fish on the hook. “Stop,” Ragnar says into the wet back of Floki’s neck, half soothing, half warning, “shh, Floki, still now. Sleep.”

“No,” Floki whimpers. 

Ragnar holds him tight, arms and legs wrapped around him. He shifts a little, tucking Floki’s head against his skin. Floki’s hair is soft, like the fur of a pup. He has no beard and no braids, a negligent man, and probably doesn’t even own a comb. 

Ragnar remembers the winter when Floki had no shoes. He met him in the woods one day, wandering, not lost, never lost in the forest. “What happened to your shoes?” Ragnar scolded. 

“They fell apart,” Floki said, which sounded like a sensible answer unless you knew that Floki was not a poor man. His skill with wood was known far and wide, and no one dared to cheat Floki when it came to paying. He could easily have afforded new shoes. 

Ragnar took him home, to his house and his wife. It was their first winter, Lagertha was just starting to show a belly, they were stupid in love and fucking all night when they weren’t just kissing and telling each other the most foolish things about each other, as if they could eat and drink their souls after feasting on their bodies. 

“So you must be Floki,” Lagertha said when he brought him inside. Floki scratched the back of his neck, face turned away at an awkward angle, eyes wandering, and mumbled, “Yes, I must be. There’s only one me, so I have to be him.”

“He has no shoes,” Ragnar announced to his wife, because he still had stupid ideas about wives, then. 

“So?” Lagertha said, raising her brows. “Why don’t you make him some, then?”

So Ragnar made shoes. Floki slept in their house for days, ate their food, caught fish at the fishing hole with Ragnar, brought wood for the fire, took up a knife and began carving: little toys for the son or daughter that would be born in the summer: a bear, a salmon, a little warrior with a round shield, a winged valkyrie. 

“Will he ever leave?” Lagertha asked one night, when she was huddled under the blankets with Ragnar, their naked limbs entangled. 

“If I tell him to,” Ragnar said. It was very rude to invite a guest and then tell him to leave, but most people didn’t need to be told. Floki though… “Have you ever had a cat?”

Lagertha smiled. “And will he join us if you tell him to?” she asked. 

Ragnar paused. He loved Lagertha fiercely for everything that she was. He already knew that he would never want another woman. But there were other things he wanted, and he hadn’t known that Lagertha knew. That she understood, that she wanted the same. He kissed her hard on the lips, breathed in her laughter, then sat up on his elbows. He looked over her bare, creamy shoulders at Floki squatting by the low burning embers and carving. 

He knew much about Floki, but he had never tested Floki’s interest in women. As far as Ragnar knew, Floki couldn’t tell a woman from a beardless man. He grinned down at Lagertha and she pulled him down into another kiss. “Do you want us to try?” he whispered, still giddy. 

She reached down between them. When she stroked his manhood her fingers were wet. “I think we both want to.”

Ragnar kissed her once more, on her shoulder then lifted his head and called, “Floki!”

Floki ceased carving. For a moment he was completely still, then he threw a quick, furtive glance over his shoulder. Lagertha, growing impatient, also pushed herself up on her elbows. Seeing him just sitting there, she looked quizzically at Ragnar, so he held up a hand: wait for it. “Floki,” he called again, teasing. 

Floki got up – and went to the table, picking up a bowl, then a cup, before aimlessly wandering to the door. He stroked the wood there, leaned against it for a deep breath or two, before finally coming over to the bed. Ragnar cleared his throat, fighting the sudden urge to giggle. Lagertha kicked him under the sheets.

“I know what you want,” Floki said, surprising them both. He was intently studying the blankets. Suddenly he was seized by twitching laughter. “You’re not the first, you know.”

Ragnar grew hot with a strange tangle of jealousy that he hadn’t expected. What did it concern him what Floki had done with others? Some said he had a voracious appetite, like the god he was named for, that some of the men and women who came to him for aid that had nothing to do with ships paid him with their bodies, or that he bewitched them. Some men even boasted that they had had him like a woman. Ragnar had never paid these tales much heed, but maybe he should have. 

Lagertha, more level-headed than he, asked, “The first to want you, or the first to get you?”

“Heh,” Floki said, hiding his mouth by curling his fingers over his lips and shook his head. 

Ragnar had had enough. He bent forward, grabbed Floki, and pulled him down on the bed between them. Lagertha pounced on his other arm, and together they held him down as he squirmed and laughed like a ticklish child until he was breathless and flushed. “You’re joking,” Ragnar growled, half in jest. “You’re a little liar. Look at him. He can’t even hold still long enough to tell us more of his lies.”

Floki stilled, just going limp in their grip, like a fire suddenly doused in water. Ragnar let go of him, even though he didn’t want to. Something had kindled in him, and now he wanted to hold Floki down, pull the loose clothes from his thin limbs, taste his skin, pillage his body. Floki stopped breathing when they released him, his charcoal painted eyelids fluttered down until his eyes were only bright, glassy slits of reflected firelight, and then he whispered, “The trees hold their silence in winter. They wait, wait and see, if this is the fimbulwinter, the darkness without dawn – did you know that the trees don’t speak to me in winter?” 

Ragnar opened his mouth, but Lagertha laid a finger onto his lips, silencing him. 

“I have to look deep, deep into the wood, have to watch it as it burns,” Floki went on. His hands snuck down the bed, until they found theirs, and he lifted them and placed them on his scrawny chest, next to each other. “They speak when they burn. Sometimes they scream, sometimes they laugh. Sometimes I want to set fire to the forest, just to watch it sing. In winter. Only in winter.”

He entwined his hands with theirs, stroking each finger, as if counting them, and learning them by heart. He mapped their calluses – sword, shield, knife, axe – and the softness between. Then he pulled their hands to his lips and kissed them. “Askr,” he said, “and Embla.” Ash and Elm tree, the first man and first woman, given life by the gods. Floki licked their fingertips and smiled, like a man who had tasted a secret. “I can see inside of you,” he said. “I know what you’ll make.”

Lagertha leaned close and kissed their mad boat builder on the lips. “What is that?”

Floki followed her kiss with simple, almost innocent greed, baring his neck to Ragnar, who bent down to lick a broad stripe, then nip at the skin. “Yes, what is that?”

Floki shuddered, and moaned in pleasure, “Fire.”

*

On the ship, Ragnar holds Floki and whispers into his thin hair. “Fire,” he mouths, “remember, Floki?”

Finally, Floki draws a deep breath and goes still and loose-limbed in Ragnar’s embrace. Warmth spreads between them until Ragnar sighs in pleasure. It’s almost like being at home, in a dry bed. Even the storm seems to calm down. The boat rocks like a cradle, up and down and west. 

The cawing of the ravens at dawn wakes Ragnar from a strange dream that is half memory and half story. In his dream, he is home, it is that winter when he made shoes for Floki and Lagertha was big with child. She sits on the bed, holding Floki’s wrists; he hides his face against her bare thigh, and Ragnar fucks him slow and teasing. But he’s also a boy in his dream, lying in bed with Rollo, and their mother sings Ragnar’s favorite song: how Loki came to Aegir’s feast and insulted the gods. Her voice grows soft when she sings: _Then Thor entered the feasting hall /and his foul flyting the shaper of lies did cease/ for he saw the thunderer, and thus did take his leave:/ I have said all that whetted my thoughts, I have spoken as much as I please / but before thee alone I shall hold my tongue and keep at last my peace…_ But at the same time as he is man and boy, in the dream is he also a god, the great Thor, bedding himself in the giant’s shoe on the journey to Utgard, and with him is Loki, and they are shield brothers like none will ever be, and Loki touches his hammer with one hand, and smiles and undoes his breeches with the other, and says, “Before thee alone I shall hold my tongue, Ragnar hairy-breeches…”

He is hard when he wakes, and soon discovers why: Floki is moving against him, rubbing the small of his back and his tailbone against Ragnar’s cock like a cat in heat. Ragnar cracks one eye open, surveying the ship over the crown of Floki’s scruffy head. All is well, the men on rowing duty seem half asleep, Erik is at the steering oar holding course away from the rising sun.

Ragnar brushes his lips against the shell of Floki’s ear. “Can you be quiet?” he asks in a rough whisper.

Floki nods, and Ragnar can feel him shiver with mischief and glee. One of Floki’s hands tangles with his as they free Ragnar’s cock. Briefly, his desire feels almost like rage, because he wants more than hands and knows that he can’t have it right now, but then Floki guides him and presses his thighs together just so, and the tightness and heat that encloses him is almost like being inside Floki, only a little drier, a little rougher, a little more friction. He thrusts, and yes, that’s it, it’s so good Ragnar wants to groan in relief. Like he promised, Floki is silent, almost eerily so, but he moves back against each thrust, and his back arches in ecstasy when the slick tip of Ragnar’s cock slides past his balls. Then suddenly he gets it into his head to try and turn around inside the sleeping bag, but Ragnar is far gone to indulge anyone but himself. He grabs Floki’s hips, which are narrow and bony and don’t have the heft of a woman’s hips, and holds them in place as he fucks him. 

Ragnar has no illusions that no one will notice what they’re doing. Erik is watching with a distant, dispassionate expression as he uses Floki in the way no man should let himself be used. It clearly doesn’t surprise the old raider. Erik has seen many seasons come and go, and many men. Perhaps he understands that this is not something Ragnar taking from Floki, it’s something they’re both sharing, and there is no dishonor in that, no weakness. Perhaps Erik simply knows that it is better not to cross a man like Ragnar. Perhaps, like Ragnar, he doesn’t believe that the rules of honor and law apply in the same way to each and every man. 

Ragnar smirks at Erik, and at everyone else who dares to look. He didn’t listen to his father when he was told to stay away from Floki. He didn’t listen to his mother when he decided to win the fiercest shield maiden of Midgard as his wife. He didn’t listen to the Jarl when he was told to go East. He saw Odin on the battlefield, and tasted the future in the seer’s palm. 

He ducks his head and bites Floki’s shoulder as he comes, holds his hips tight enough to bruise. “When we’re back on land,” he promises Floki with a growl. Floki laughs under his breath at that. Ragnar cuffs him on the head, but only gently, because he doesn’t mean for Floki to stop laughing. 

*

You don’t kill your shield brother. Not on a ship, not during a raid, not without proclaiming your cause for such action. You don’t simply stab him in the neck just because you don’t agree with him. At the very least, you give him the chance to die a good death. 

You don’t dump his body into the sea afterwards.

No one dares to complain, though. Ragnar waits for it, but it doesn’t happen, which makes him feel like a god, but also strangely on edge. He’s not a _berserkr_ , he doesn’t have the blood rage of Odin when he sinks his blade into flesh. Not usually, at least. Not all the time. Once or twice in his life, maybe, he saw things on the battle field that were more than real. But the men on this ship are here because they know him to be smart, quick, agile, and always thinking clearly. He is the counterweight to Floki’s wild fits and dreams, the better half of Rollo’s weakness. A leader of men. 

After a moment and a deep breath, Ragnar calms, and he begins to see that they don’t hold their silence because they are afraid of him. They keep their peace because they see no fault in what he did. 

Perhaps he is sly, perhaps he is mad. If so, where is the problem? Odin was sly before he was wise, and Loki was Odin’s chosen brother. This is the right way. Ragnar feels it in his blood, he sees it before him, as clearly as Floki sees the ships within the trees, the fire within people.

There is land to the West. 

“Release the ravens,” he says.

**Author's Note:**

> The story about Thor, Loki and the giant's shoe is actually referring to The Journey to Utgard from the prose edda, during which Thor and Loki spend a night sleeping in a giant's glove (!) which they mistake for a cave. Ragnar misremembers it in his dream. 
> 
> The quoted song is actually a bastardized bit from _Lokasenna_. I'm sorry for the rhymes, because they're neither very good nor very historically accurate. Germanic and Norse poetry rhymes by alliteration, not end rhymes. 
> 
> Apparently vikings really did share sleeping bags for warmth.


End file.
